Saturday, April 27, 2013

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott made a frosty mistake in visiting the Adelaide Ice Service factory today, arguing the business was a victim of the carbon tax. At the same time Climate Change Minister Greg Combet and local Labor MP Mark Butler announced a grant of nearly $90,000 to the company from the carbon price funded Clean Technology Food and Foundries Program to install a 87.5 kilowatt photovoltaic solar system at its ice manufacturing plant in Regency Park.

The visit continues Abbott's attempt to beat up the carbon price as a negative, but it shows just how shallow and loose with the truth his own campaign is, especially regarding climate change policy. The carbon price hasn't brought economic ruin. Indeed, there are strong arguments by Environment Victoria that the compensation package to carbon intense energy providers is overly generous. Victoria's brown coal generators are being subsidised to continue polluting to maintain healthy profits.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

In a climate protest over Australian coal exports, Greenpeace activists boarded a bulk coal carrier while navigating through the Great Barrier Reef on 23 April 2013. The ship, the MV Meister, had just loaded coal from Abbot Point, located 25km north of the town of Bowen on the central Queensland coast.

Abbot Point coal loading facility is being expanded, with four new coal terminals proposed to be built, part of the development of 9 new coal terminals for the Great Barrier Reef Coast.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Iraq has suffered decades of war with much of the social and agricultural infrastructure being damaged and now poorly maintained. Climate change was already impacting the country under Saddam Hussein with desertification and reduced river flow rates. Climate impacts of desertification, water scarcity, flood damage from more intense rain when it falls, are all taking their toll on food production. The legacy of decades of war, UN sanctions and a dictatorial regime have only added and multiplied these impacts.

The fertile plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has provided the basis for agricultural production feeding Iraq's population which has tripled between 1970 and 2007 to 30 million people. Indeed, ancient Mesopotamia may have been one of the birth places for agricultural civilisation. But according to Matteo Mantovani at TEDxBaghdad "Agriculture is dying in the place where it was born." he told the audience.

This comes at a time of rising widespread concern on fugitive CSG emissions of methane released during CSG extraction and production. Methane over short time periods of 20 years is 100 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas contributing to climate change, while for longer time periods it is about 21 times as powerful.

"The warming has occurred in progressive phases since about AD 1460, but intensification of melt is nonlinear, and has largely occurred since the mid-twentieth century. Summer melting is now at a level that is unprecedented over the past 1,000 years. We conclude that ice on the Antarctic Peninsula is now particularly susceptible to rapid increases in melting and loss in response to relatively small increases in mean temperature." concludes the study.

The information comes from a 364 meter ice core drilled by a joint UK and French research team on James Ross Island, near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Analysis of the ice core can reveal past temperature changes as well as revealing past extent of ice melt events.

In other words, the warming trend signal is still not strong enough to distinguish it above the noise of peak warming periods in multi-decade long cycles involving the Tropical Pacific atmospheric circulation, sea surface temperatures and the El Niño (ENSO) cycle.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

A new study says that global warming will impact fruit and nut tree productivity in Australia and globally. Most fruit and nut trees have evolved in cool temperate climates and go through a dormant winter phase and require a certain amount of winter chill to trigger their spring growth and fruit production. But with strong trends in many regions for warming winter minimum temperatures and reduced number of 'winter chill' days, the heat is on our orchards.

Temperatures are projected to rise in most parts of the world with winter minimum temperatures projected to rise most rapidly. Our orchards have been established taking account of current climate conditions, which are now rapidly changing due to greenhouse gas pollution contributing to climate change. This will have a major impact on costs and productivity of fruit and nut orchards, an industry estimated to be worth about US$93 billion globally in 2005.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

It seems the genetics of the Antarctic Octopus is showing us how fragile the West Antarctic Ice sheet (WAIS) may be with global warming. It raising questions about the ice sheet susceptibility to collapse.

The Antarctic octopus - Turquet's octopus - is a little creature that doesn't like moving house. It is a stay-at-home tending to live in one place and only moving short distances to escape predators. Yet when marine scientists looked at the genetic diversity of specimens of the octopus from the Ross Sea and compared them with specimens 10,000kms by sea away in the Weddell Sea they found there was little genetic difference.

To explain how these different populations can be so alike scientists believe there has been at least partial collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, with the last time perhaps being the previous interglacial period - the Eemian some 125,000 years ago. A partial collapse may have opened up a channel between the Weddell and Ross Seas.

The new Premier of Victoria Denis Napthine today announced a major restructure of the Victorian Public service, with a new Department of State Development, Business and Innovation. The Premier highlighted that Energy and Resources portfolio would be brought into the new Department. This includes development of Victorian's notoriously dirty and carbon intensive brown coal.

Part of the restructure entails the merger of the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) and the Department of Primary Industry. Ostensibly to cut red tape, in reality it is more likely to result in greater development at the expense of environmental and conservation issues.

Hidden towards the end of the media release the Premier says, "Bringing the Energy and Resources portfolio into DSDBI will enable a sharper focus on major development opportunities such as Victoria's coal resources."

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Peter Sinclair has put together another educative video gem on the decline of Arctic Sea Ice, and indeed global sea ice. The video mixes together video footage of Lord Monckton from 2009, 2011, and 2013 to show his inconsistency, with the facts and observations from climate scientists on sea ice decline.

The video covers the recent and unusually extensive ice fractures seen in the Beaufort Sea from the beginning of February through March. This highlights that most of this sea ice is seasonal or first year ice. Sea ice extent continues to track well below model predictions for the disintegration of summer sea ice. Sea Ice volume trend is even more stark with a projection of a possible ice free summer as early as 2016.

Friday, April 5, 2013

Over 1000 people are reported to have turned up to keep climate change action in the spotlight and to greet President Barack Obama at a $32,500-per-person dinner in Pacific Heights, San Fransisco, to keep the pressure on for him to reject the Keystone XL pipeline proposal which would see tar sands oil flow from Alberta Canada to the Texas refineries on the Gulf Coast.

The protest even includied a brass band (youtube video), to provide a festival atmosphere.

Protests against the Tar Sands are escalating. In Seattle two protestors U-locked their necks to the doors of the Canadian consulate in Solidarity with Tar Sands Blockade and Idle No More and in Protest of West Coast Tar Sands Projects. The activists were arrested and charged with criminal trespass.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Tasmania, that small island state of Australia that protrudes into the Southern Ocean, has recorded it's hottest March on record in over 100 years of temperature record keeping.

The mean March temperature across the state was 15.7C, breaking the 1974 record by 0.3 degrees and 2.2 °C above normal. The Bureau of Meteorology said in a statement "The state average maximum temperature was a March record of 21.0 (2.9 °C above normal and 0.9 °C above the previous record from 1974), and minimum temperatures were the 3rd-warmest for March at 10.3 °C (1.6 °C above normal)."

Monday, April 1, 2013

Antarctic sea ice extent is a complex and puzzling beast, not following a simple process of rapid Arctic sea ice diminishment. A new paper in Nature Geoscience argues that warm deep ocean currents are contributing to ice shelf melt and causing Antarctic sea ice expansion. While ice mass loss from Antarctica is presently at 250 Gigatonnes per year and accelerating, sea ice is also expanding slowly but to record levels. What a paradox!

The trend for a gradual increase in Antarctic Sea ice has puzzled scientists for some time. The expansion is at odds with general climate model results. I reported on the puzzle of Record Antarctic Sea Ice Growth in November 2012. In that article I explained that (Holland et al 2012) argued that atmospheric variability in the form of local winds was pushing the ice northwards creating space for new sea ice to form. While climate deniers claimed record Antarctic sea-ice was a refutation of climate change, in reality it showed they could not fathom that the cryosphere and the planet's climate are complex processes which we are still trying to understand, with some surprising processees not readily open to be modelled.

Did you know that during 2011 sea level rise went into reverse and lost 5mm from the global oceans? No? How about that since then, much to the chagrin of climate deniers, sea level rise has accelerated from 3.18mm per year - the rate from 1993 to 2010 - to increase to 10mm per year over the last two years. This acceleration more than makes up for the pothole. The primary cause of this sea level 'speed bump' was the back to back La Nina which moved a phenomenal amount of water from the global oceans to the land. The water has since been making it's way back into the world's oceans.

The question arises, does this explain the 10mm per year increase in sea level rise over the last 2 years? Is ocean thermal expansion or ice sheet melting perhaps contributing more? This may also be the start to an exponential sea level rise which NASA climatologist James Hansen has argued is a possibility. Rob Painting on Skeptical Science says that there is no evidence yet to suggest that ice loss from Greenland or Antarctica has added to the speed bump in any significant manner. We will have to wait and see what the impact of future El Nino or La Nina's will be on sea level rise, and keep watching the rate of mass loss from the ice sheets.

I came across this lecture by climatologist Kevin Trenbeth in which he talks about this sea level speed bump as a unique occurrence in recorded history. While previously there has been slight reductions in sea level rise corresponding to La Nina years, this event is a prominent change. Trenbeth discusses this extreme event near the end of his lecture on October 15, 2012. It is well worth watching the Youtube video if you have a spare 1 hour and 5 minutes. He provides an excellent introduction to climate change and extreme weather events and he is an animated speaker with clear and informative graphical and text slides.

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About Me

Time to leap out of the slowly boiling pot of earth's warming climate
into action on climate mitigation and adaption.
I don't want my children to ask why I didn't act after reading the
scientific reports of climate risks. I write on the
effects of human induced climate change, sea level rise, ocean
acidification, biodiversity loss, environmental and social impacts of
global warming, and climate protests from a Melbourne Citizen
Journalist.

A member of environmental NGOs and community groups for 30 years in Australia, currently living in Melbourne. I have been a Citizen journalist for the Indymedia network in Australia and worldwide from 2000, as an editor and contributor with Australia Indymedia and the global features collective. Since 2013 I have contributed many stories to Margot Kingston's citizen journalism website: nofibs.com.au. (See my article archive) I also post photoessays to Flickr and videos to Youtube and edit wikipedia as user Tirin. My website is takver.com where I can be contacted through the feedback form, the most reliable way to contact me. I can also be contacted through facebook and on twitter as @takvera.